North American Network Operators Group

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Re: And Now for Something Completely Different (was Re: IPv6 news)

  • From: Paul Vixie
  • Date: Sun Oct 16 13:29:45 2005

# ...
# 
# Obviously, some of the disadvantages of such an approach would be that it
# would require both ends to play and end users wouldn't be able to
# traceroute.  I'm sure there are many other disadvantages as well.  ...

ok, so here's the problem.  we don't have what the iab thinks of as end-to-end
and we have not had it for a long time and it's not coming back under any
circumstances.  but the people willing to serve on the iab, as filtered down
to the set of people willing to be put on the iab by any particular nomcom, do
not believe this, or they believe it but they behave like a supreme court
nominee who gets an inevitable question about roe-v-wade and their knee jerks
and they say "i support the constitution".

so even though NAT is here to stay and firewalls are here to stay and proxies
are here to stay and most ipv6 deployment by the end of its useful lifetime
will have used RFC1918-like private addressing, or be behind firewalls that
limit flows to what a security administrator can predict and protect and
understand... officially the IAB can never, ever recognize this or act on it
or make decisions or interpretations or recommendations based on it.  that's
how politics "just is" and our proper course is to build and deploy technology
that works even if it goes against what the IAB has writ and seems a little bit
subversive at the time it comes out (as with firewalls, and NAT), and let the
political world play catch-up to the real world that we actually live in.

# However, if an approach like this would be technically feasible (and I'm not
# entirely sure it would be), I suspect it would get deployed _much_ faster
# than an approach that requires every network stack to be modified. Again.
# Particularly given the number of folks who care about multi-homing are so
# small relative to the number of folks on the Internet.

right.

# Can two evils make a good?  :-)

definitely.